On 13 September 1987, two men went looking for scrap in the ruins of a radiotherapy clinic in Goiânia that had been abandoned with its equipment still inside. Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira were scavengers, and what they found looked like a heavy lead-and-steel canister worth selling. Inside was a sealed capsule of caesium-137 chloride, a radiotherapy source that should never have been left behind. They sold it on to a scrapyard owner, Devair Ferreira. By the time it reached his yard the capsule had been broken open, and in the dark the powder inside glowed a soft blue. Ferreira thought it was beautiful. He thought it might be valuable. He showed it to his family, and they showed it to their neighbours, and small handfuls of it moved from house to house across the neighbourhood — rubbed on skin, given to children, admired at kitchen tables by people who had every reason to assume that anything so lovely could not be lethal, and no way at all of knowing otherwise.

It was Maria Gabriela Ferreira, Devair's wife, who worked out that the people around her were falling ill in the same way at the same time. Days after the vomiting and burns began, she took what remained of the source across the city to a public health clinic and made someone look at it. A visiting physicist recognised what he was dealing with, and the emergency response — one of the largest in Brazilian public health history — began from that moment. She saved an unknown number of lives and could not save her own. Maria Gabriela died on 23 October 1987, aged 37. Leide das Neves Ferreira, the scrapyard owner's six-year-old niece, died the same day; she had played with the powder and eaten a sandwich with it still on her hands. Israel Batista dos Santos, 22, died on 27 October. Admilson Alves de Souza, 18, died the following day. Around 112,000 people were screened in the weeks that followed, and 249 of them were found to be contaminated.

Decontaminating Goiânia meant taking the city apart in places. Houses were demolished, topsoil stripped, furniture, clothing and rubble sealed into drums and containers. All of it had to go somewhere, and somewhere turned out to be here. The choice was fiercely contested — residents of what was then a rural district on Goiânia's edge did not want the country's radioactive waste in their fields, and said so loudly. They lost the argument. In 1997 the National Nuclear Energy Commission completed a permanent repository alongside its new Central-West Regional Centre for Nuclear Sciences, holding roughly 3,500 cubic metres of material — about six thousand tonnes — in engineered structures inside what is now the Telma Ortegal State Park, a little over a kilometre from the inhabited part of town. The vaults were designed to remain sound for 300 years and to withstand earthquakes and aircraft impact. The commission monitors the site continuously and reports no detectable radioactivity beyond it.

Caesium-137 decays with a half-life of just over thirty years. Since 1987 the material in those vaults has passed one half-life and started on the next, which means it is now roughly half as radioactive as the day it was buried — and will still be a quarter as radioactive around 2048, an eighth around 2078. That is the scale the engineers had to design for, and it is why the containment is measured in centuries rather than decades. It is also why the site has an odd double role: a waste dump and a research institution occupying the same ground, with scientists studying the consequences of the accident within sight of its remains.

Everything above is what Abadia de Goiás is known for, and almost none of it is what living here is like. The town became a municipality in 1995 by plebiscite, carved out of pieces of Goiânia, Trindade, Guapó and Aragoiânia, and it has grown fast since — the 2022 census counted 19,128 residents, well over double the population a decade earlier. Trindade lies to the north and east, Goiânia to the northwest, and the BR-060 carries people between them daily. The economy runs on services, public sector jobs, small industry and farming: cattle and dairy, poultry, and fields of rice, manioc and corn. Commuters go into the capital in the morning and come home at night. Children go to school. The vaults sit quietly on their hill, and the four names belong to a city down the road that has never stopped remembering them.